The public now has unprecedented access to dozens more research journals, including the prestigious Nature, as publisher Macmillan announced that 49 of its titles will be available through a free content-sharing model starting today.

“We’re in a major battle right now for the future of the industry,” former Macmillan CEO Brian Napack said at the Publishers Launch conference Wednesday. Here’s why clashes between Amazon and book publishers are inevitable.

There’s a brewing conflict over consumers’ rights to use platforms like ReDigi to resell their books, music and other digital property. Now libraries and companies like eBay and Redbox are leading a campaign to pass “You bought it, you own it” laws.

Pan Macmillan Australia’s digital-only imprint Momentum will remove DRM from all its titles by August, the company announced today. Last month, Macmillan sci-fi/fantasy imprint Tor/Forge announced it will drop DRM by early July.

John Sargent, CEO of book publisher Macmillan, has written a blog post defending his company’s new “agency model” approach to e-book sales through retailers such as Amazon and Apple, but all the post really shows is how desperate Macmillan is to protect its existing business model.

Amazon is coming under fire for sanctioning Macmillan, after the book publisher said it wanted to raise prices for its e-books. But in reality, Amazon is just doing to the book industry what Apple did to the record labels in the early days of the iPod.